MBA career services: How Kellogg career coaches help you find the right job

What do career services and coaching at Kellogg really look like? Spoiler alert: It’s a lot more than résumé tips and mock interviews.  

In this conversation with Mary Simon, director of career coaching and education at Kellogg, she shares how her team helps MBA students clarify goals, develop recruiting strategies and build the tools to conduct a successful job search now and at any stage of their career. Whether you're pivoting industries or figuring out what’s next, you’ll get a real-world look at the support waiting on the other side of enrollment. 

Mary Simon is the director of career coaching and education at the CMC, where she has coached thousands of students in their MBA job search and facilitated workshops on subjects like networking, interviewing and conducting industry research. She previously worked in executive search, where she conducted searches for the C-suite and other senior executive roles. 

What does an MBA career coach do? 

I often say to incoming students that your career coach is your partner and your advocate in the career journey. At the core of it, your job search is about you discovering your goals and motivations. You drive the car on your career journey, but your coach will help to focus you so that you can make sure you’re going in the right direction. 

While you may have done some career coaching in the past, many students are surprised to discover the depth and level of customization that Kellogg career coaches provide. Everyone’s career journey is different, but no matter your industry experience, or whether you are an international or a domestic student, Kellogg career coaches offer customized support to leverage your previous experience toward an effective career search strategy. 

We’ll support you with everything from discovering your career goals to finding companies that meet your search criteria, building a target list, perfecting your applications, preparing for interviews and negotiating an offer. Our coaches can even talk to you about identifying the competencies needed for a particular role and direct you to Kellogg resources and tools that can help you develop the skills you’re missing. 

Will career coaching help me to get a job after my MBA? 

In short, yes! We will help you devise a plan for getting that first job out of school and support your recruitment efforts along the way. However, a career coach can do much more than that. We believe that if you take the time during the MBA job search to think about the core skills, values and career objectives that you hold, you can use this experience to forge a clear path to where you want to be mid and long-term in your career. 

And that’s really what the MBA experience is all about: positioning yourself not just for your first post-MBA job, but for your entire career.  

Through coaching, workshops, and self-reflection assessments, the Career Management Center can help you to ask yourself the big questions about your motivations and values and a career coach can help you turn that self-knowledge into both an actionable search plan for this job search while also considering your long-term career strategy.  

How often should I meet with a career coach during my time at Kellogg? 

The students who most effectively leverage coaching are the ones who form a relationship with their coach, keeping them up to date on their career efforts, coming back for multiple appointments throughout the year and tweaking their strategy in response to market feedback. But frequency is not the only thing to consider.  

Ultimately, the most successful students are the ones who have done a lot of self-reflection work and industry research because they can get the most customized, targeted assistance from their coach. A coach can certainly point you in one direction, but we are most effective when we simply listen to you as you process your job search in real time, and our contribution to your search only improves the more we get to know you. 

What is a common misconception about career coaching? 

I would say that students are often surprised to find how many resources and tools are available to them at Kellogg, and that they usually discover how to use these tools through career coaching. For example, students can connect with and gain insights from alumni through the Alumni Edge program and on-campus recruiting activities. Or they can receive tactical application and interview support through our Career Peers program, or access valuable company research tools through our CMC Library, just to name a few of the incredible opportunities that Kellogg offers.  

There is a whole constellation of career resources here, from employer connections fostered by our Employer Relations team to the vast trove of historical recruiting data that we maintain, and these programs and resources all work together to facilitate the market for MBA talent, connect students with potential employers and prepare you for the challenges of an MBA-level job search.

Even after you graduate, the Kellogg career experience doesn’t end, with alumni coaching and continued access to the Kellogg Job Board. There really is so much, and coaches can help to tune you into what you may want to take advantage of in the future. 

What’s one piece of advice you wish every incoming student knew about career coaching? 

If you put in the work to really understand your career motivations and are intentional in your job search, you can get A LOT out of this experience, even if you don’t achieve the exact outcome that you envision. While the first job after an MBA is often seen as a major milestone to a new and improved career, it’s also true that the process of landing that first job has so much to offer you in terms of self-understanding and developing your focus.  

As a coach, the true reward of this work is when someone finds something — either a role or a valuable bit of self-knowledge — that is going to draw them toward a fulfilling career path. Of course there are times when, despite everyone’s best efforts, a job search doesn’t go exactly as planned. But believe it or not, there may even be more to learn during this process, since you will need to reexamine the why of your career goals.

I’d much rather that you stumble here — where you have so many people and tools to support you — and discover something about yourself through this process than watch you follow a path when you haven’t actually asked yourself: Is this the right thing for me? 

Interested in learning more? Visit MBA career services for a deeper look at the support waiting for you on the other side of enrollment.